Ask HN: On China VPN block, would you help us out?

Hi HN, A native Chinese living in China mainland here, may I ask for your help:

If you are a hacker, online freedom NGO or a team in any form, would you develop software or technology to help us bypass the Great Firewall in China? I mean a real total solution beyond tips or workarounds.

Dictators always want to control the free flow of information, seems they’re one step closer to the target. Please do something to stop that. No matter it’s China, Iran or who-knows-who-is-next.

TL;DR version: GFW is not new, but recently it becomes severely tight up. Things got worsen months ago, GFW got technical upgrade which enabled it to interfere even OpenVPN and SSH tunnel which had worked fine for a long time. I had used openvpn and astrill for 2 years, worked perfectly okay (to bypass internet filtering instead of privacy concern), GFW could not do anything to them but after the tech upgrade, no matter how I config protocol, port, TLS, MTU, no matter where the server is, the VPN connection could not be established or last no longer than 5 minutes. Tor? Too slow.

We guess the big brother has been collecting commercial VPN services’ data or GFW gained ability to operate based on packet behavior.

I’m not saying my whole life is total f*cked because of that but the truth is that I’m and so many people here are really angered and frustrated. It’s not because facebook or youtube, it’s about us connecting with the world. Our right to watch, know and learn from YOU and the outside world is abruptly violated.

Sometimes I even wondered there’re people like Anonymous who would bother to take down some websites (I personally think that’s controversial way to express or protest), why not leverage you tech skills, teamwork and passion to do something to the GFW? Track the GFW nodes down? Analyze how it works? Counter interfere it? Develop a new tech solution?

And Finally Unblock Us?

Thanks for your patience and hope I’ll still be able to come back to you.

5 comments

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cjbprime 13y ago ↗

> GFW gained ability to operate based on packet behavior.

Yes, that's what happened -- keyword is "deep packet inspection".

> Tor? Too slow.

I think Tor is your best bet, either directly or indirectly. One of the projects coming out of Tor is "obfsproxy", which attempts to defeat deep packet inspection by obfuscating the protocol that you're using so that it looks like a different one: https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

(So, perhaps it will be possible to use OpenVPN routed through obfsproxy?)

e1ven 13y ago ↗

I'm working on a package that will help. I don't think there's any silver-bullet single-solution, but we're trying to make things better.

What would be the best way to get in touch with other people in your situation? Is translation worthwhile, or should I spend my time beefing up the tech instead?

Email me - E1ven@e1ven.com - I'd love to know as much about your specific situation as possible. I can't promise a perfect solution, but we're trying.

Hm, please don't give unpublished/unaudited circumvention software to people in censored regimes -- you could get them in a lot of trouble by promising privacy that you aren't actually giving them.

I agree; I think it's important to be extraordinarily careful in such circumstances.

But I also think it's important to engage with potential users whenever possible, to help ensure I'm building something that's actually useful and helpful, rather than spinning my wheels on my guess on what to do.

resettarget 13y ago ↗

Grateful for your kindness, e1ven and cjbprime. I'll write you email soon.

I understand cjbprime's concern which is reasonable. Using it for bypassing blocking while not privacy can be the 1st step. anyway there must be somebody does the beta test :-)